(Top) Since opening just over a year ago, The Boys & Girls Club of Frazier Mountain has brought smiles to the faces of children?like these two on a 2006 field trip?from over one hundred families. (bottom) In 2006 the Boys & Girls Club started off with a bang with field trips (left) and the first Safety Fair at Frazier Mountain Park (right). Its second annual Safety Fair brought its second summer program to a close.
By Linda MacKay, Co-President of the Boys & Girls Club Board
The Boys & Girls Club of Frazier Mountain is proud to have celebrated our one year anniversary providing services to the families of the Frazier Mountain communities.
Our club opened its doors in June of 2006, beginning with a five-day-a-week full-day summer camp. In August of 2006 we began the after-school program. Now we’ve completed our second summer day camp program and have started our after school program for the new school year.
We’re proud of our accomplishments.
We have served well over one hundred families in our first year of operation. The Frazier Park Church of Christ has allowed us to use their church building as our club site. It has been a perfect location, especially since the church is directly across the street from our beautiful Frazier Mountain Park.
To commemorate our anniversary we have been asked to explain how it all began. Our summer camp and after-school programs have been ‘a long time coming’ and they are a service the community has needed for many, many years.
While serving as the president of the Mountain Communities Town Council in the spring of 2005, I was contacted by Bakersfield City Councilman David Couch. At that time he was president of the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Kern County.
Mr. Couch explained that the Boys & Girls Clubs of Kern County was reaching out to the rural communities of Kern. He asked if the mountain communities might be interested in starting a local club under the umbrella of the Kern County club. I said I believed that our Mountain Communities would be very interested in having a Boys & Girls Club!
The Need
Our communities’ needs in this sector were known to me from serving as town council president, and because I have worked at the Healthy Start Family Resource Center for several years as a Family Advocate. The need for a good community program that can assist families with after-school and summer care has often come to my attention.
The Mountain Communities Healthy Start Collaborative was officially formed in the fall of 1996 by some very dedicated volunteers. Community volunteers did extensive door-to-door surveys and held numerous meetings to learn the needs expressed by our Mountain Community residents as an obligation of their application for funding through the federal Healthy Start grant program.
The Family Resource Center actually opened its doors in 1999. One of the largest messages from those surveys was that the community needed and wanted an after-school program where children could go to be safe, nurtured and mentored during non-school times.
The devoted volunteers who were involved in the initial stages of creating the Family Resource Center also went on to create the nonprofit Mountain Arts and Recreation Coalition (MARC) who coordinated all the efforts to put our Frazier Mountain Park skatepark in place.
The dream continued from those early years to focus on the need for an afterschool program to ensure the safety and well-being of our children. But until the contact from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Kern County in 2005, the pieces never seemed to fall together just right to create a viable program.
Mentors
It was very helpful to partner with the Kern County group not only because they have had several years of experience running over twenty sites in Bakersfield, but because they also showed us exactly what we needed to do to create a Frazier Mountain club.
From our first meeting, executive director Zane Smith let us know that our local Mountain Communities would be responsible for providing the funds to operate and sustain our local club. Although, Zane was quick to assist us in applying for two significant grants from the national Offices of Juvenile Programs (OJP) for $20,000 and another grant from Kaiser Family Foundation for over $10,000. Our doors were able to open as early as they did in the summer of 2006 because of this quick assistance.
The Kern County Boys & Girls Club staff has been generous, helpful and kind in their dealings with our community. That same staff has also been very impressed with our local volunteers.
Zane said more than once that the Frazier Mountain community is a real pleasure to work with because of the enthusiasm and effort that all of the volunteers have demonstrated from the very beginning.
Our mentors from Bakersfield helped us form our local board under the umbrella of the nonprofit status of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Kern County in the fall of 2005. It has been a solid partnership. We have benefited from their experience and knowledge and they have gained a club with heart and great community spirit.
Other than the initial grants that Zane assisted our club to obtain, most of the fundraising for our club has come completely through grassroots efforts.There has been no large corporate support for our club so far.
Our club currently serves children from five to twelve years of age. Our yearly budget is approximately $50,000 for staff salaries, rent, utilities, insurance and supplies.
The Frazier Mountain Boys & Girls Club "Name Your Price" Thrift Store, under the efforts of the store’s manager, Dave Assaly, has been a vehicle for raising funds for our club.
Many community individuals and small businesses donated generously over the last two years. We have no way to thank everyone enough who has given to our club.
We also appreciate the support that The Mountain Enterprise has given the club. The newspaper has been very helpful in getting the word out about our various fundraisers and other community events.
On July 14 we officially celebrated our one-year anniversary at our second annual Safety Day event. It was generously supported by several county, state and federal agencies. It was a fabulously fun day.
Even though we sponsored the event as more of a service to the community to educate everyone about all the various agencies such as fire, law enforcement and forestry that help keep our communities safe, we were able to raise over one thousand dollars in funds to support the continued operations of our local Boys & Girls Club.
A history wouldn’t be complete without giving a lot of credit to our Boys & Girls Club of Frazier Mountain program director, Lisa Walter, and to all of the great activity leaders who’ve worked for the club over the last year.
Lisa has been the club’s program director from the very beginning. She’s a wonderful woman whose compassion for the children and the support she gives the club makes all the difference in the world. The club has benefited from the excellent leadership and awesome support staff.
I hope this article gives the reader a better understanding of where we’ve been and how the Boys & Girls Club of Frazier Mountain was created.
The Future
We also hope that the community will help us with our future plans to expand our program to serve older children, through young adulthood. We have a vision that our local Boys & Girls Club will be the place where our Mountain Communities’ children can come to grow into happy and healthy adults-adults who will be able to turn around and give back to their community.
Anyone who would like to donate or volunteer for the Boys & Girls Club of Frazier Mountain can contact Linda MacKay at (661) 248-6224 or check out our great website created by our hardworking board vice president Kim Volkmar at www.bgclubfraziermtn.org.
This is part of the August 31, 2007 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.
Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you.
